Privacy-Aware Cloud Auditing for GDPR Compliance Verification in Online Healthcare

Barati, Masoud; Aujla, Gagangeet Singh; Llanos, Jose Tomas; Duodu, Kwabena Adu; Rana, Omer F.; Carr, Madeline; Rajan, Rajiv

Abstract

Emerging multi-tenant cloud computing ecosystems allow multiple applications to share virtualised pool of computing and networking resources. As a result such ecosystems are becoming increasingly prone to data privacy concerns (personal data leakages and unauthorised access). While cloud computing providers support robust security and privacy mechanisms (e.g, public key cryptography, firewalls, virtual private networks, among many others), they lack mechanisms and frameworks to monitor, audit and verify these data privacy concerns. The emergence of data protection regulations around the world, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the Data Protection Act (DPA) in the UK, further emphasise the need to overcome these privacy limitations. A novel technique for monitoring, auditing and verifying the operations carried out on a users personal data in cloud computing ecosystems is proposed. Our research methodology leverages distributed ledger technologies (e.g., Blockchain, Smart Contracts) for developing an immutable recording technique, which transparently logs, monitors and verifies the operations carried out on user data. Using a healthcare pharmacy scenario and extensive real-world experiments, we validate the feasibility of the proposed technique. The proposed work handles a large pool of requests (> 13K) ensuring minimal latency (approx. 50-60 ms) and overheads for three different service packages varied with respect to the number of actors and operations).

Citation

Barati, M., Aujla, G. S., Llanos, J. T., Duodu, K. A., Rana, O. F., Carr, M., & Rajan, R. (2022). Privacy-Aware Cloud Auditing for GDPR Compliance Verification in Online Healthcare. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 18(7), 4808-4819. https://doi.org/10.1109/tii.2021.3100152

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 22, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jul 27, 2021
• Publication Date: 2022-07
• Deposit Date: Jul 28, 2021
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
• Print ISSN: 1551-3203
• Electronic ISSN: 1941-0050
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 7
• Pages: 4808-4819
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/tii.2021.3100152
• Keywords: blockchain, container-based monitoring, data privacy, healthcare, smart contracts
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2789778